by Bill Chambers Maudlin trash, The Game Plan makes The Pacifier--one of the prototypes for this slop--look like No Country for Old Men. Again we have a beefcake bachelor (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) in a macho profession (football) learning to stop worrying and love the Devil's spawn. The Rock plays star quarterback Joe "The King" Kingman, whose cushy, Elvis-accessorized lifestyle is interrupted by the sudden appearance of a little girl claiming to be his long lost daughter. Named Peyton (not after Peyton Manning or Walter Payton, as a leatherhead would hope, but Nobel Prize-winning M.D. Peyton Rous--an early herald of her precocious pretentiousness), she invites herself to stay for a month while her mother ostensibly does philanthropic work in Africa. In the meantime, Mother or some facsimile is fed the lie that Peyton is away at ballet camp (in January?! The film opens on New Year's Eve), and Joe becomes a pawn in maintaining this illusion by striking a Faustian bargain with Mater Suspiriorium, er, Monique Vasquez (Roselyn Sanchez), the compulsory love interest and gatekeeper of the local prestigious dance academy. (The Game Plan takes place in a Boston so generic it may as well be Metropolis.) Ingratiating herself with Joe's clownish team-mates (no "Playmakers"-style conflicts for these guys), if not his pragmatic--and flatulent!--agent (Kyra Sedgwick, of all people), Peyton ultimately, predictably, succeeds in her kamikaze campaign to be crowned "the best thing that ever happened" to Joe.

by Walter Chaw An interminable trudge through afterschool-special hell, Adam Shankman's A Walk to Remember stars teen pop starlet Mandy Moore and is based on a novel by best-selling schmaltz-meister Nicholas Sparks--a combination sure to warn away most reasonably intelligent folks. After a kinetic opening sequence that recalls a nearly identical scene from The Lost Boys while giving false hope that A Walk to Remember will be an agreeably nostalgic diversion, the film becomes a vaguely surreal morality play scripted along the straitjacket genre conventions that indicate each of Sparks's novels. A Walk to Remember is hopelessly unrealistic and often uncomfortable to watch, far more interested in presenting Moore with showcase opportunities to peddle her cavity-causing music; it threatens to do for her what Glitter did for Mariah Carey. Worse, if you don't know every single plot point and twist after the first twenty minutes, you've done the sensible thing and left after the first ten.

by Walter Chaw As sociology goes, "The Simple Life" is not without cleverness. I'm not referring to the predictable meltdown of sticking Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton in the middle of the Ozarks, but rather the way in which our own prejudices about the extremes of class are manipulated with calculated cruelty. Every episode is preceded by the kind of narration that opens "The Dukes of Hazzard"--the show hates Nicole and Paris on the one hand because they represent absolutely every single evil quality that humans are capable of, and it hates the fine people of Altus, AR on the other hand because they're "simple." It's not a true test as reality shows go: after all, there are no stakes for the retarded heiresses asked to spend five weeks living the titular life who don't treat the stunt as an opportunity to improve themselves but as one to mess around at the expense of people for whom there is something at stake--like livelihood. The series would be a lot better if Nicole and Paris were threatened with being cut off from their inheritances should they act like crass, directionless, shiftless morons.

January 24, 2014

January 25, 2004|An unwritten policy says that before interviewing a new subject for the first time, you should see the film and log the review so that the review isn't flavoured by bias, by whether you love or hate the filmmaker. It's almost impossible, particularly for an inexperienced critic, to separate affection for a person with a more diplomatic look at the person's picture--and difficult as well to separate the persona that an artist presents to media with who the person actually is. Everybody's your friend on the junket and we need each other: I need to fill my column (and hopefully with a compelling face), they need to publicize their films, and we get famous together in our respective disciplines. The whole thing is a little parasitic.

January 11, 2002|Shane West loves horror movies--explanation, perhaps, for his participation in the Wes Craven-produced Dracula 2000. And he has a knowledge of them that belies his relatively tender age of twenty-three. It's an undercurrent of the slightly wicked (with his horror jones and his punk band Average Jo) that fuels his persona across various heartthrob fansites dedicated to celebrating the young, the pretty, the slightly dangerous. Mr. West's knowledge of film, his respect for his craft, and his politeness and obvious decency are qualities each that seem all too rare in any walk much less Tinsel Town. It's early yet in Mr. West's career, the upcoming adaptation of Nicholas Sparks's A Walk to Remember is only his second leading role, but it's his performance as the soulful Eli Sammler on ABC's well-regarded drama "Once and Again" that has been the key to his rising popularity and critical recognition.

"Pygmalion saw so much to blame in women that he came at last to abhor the sex, and resolved to live unmarried. He was a sculptor, and had made with wonderful skill a statue of ivory, so beautiful that no living woman came anywhere near it... His art was so perfect that it concealed itself and its product looked like the workmanship of nature." - Bulfinch's Mythology

Andrew Niccol's brilliant S1m0ne is an updating of the Pygmalion myth substituting a sculptor of clay for a sculptor of film and his disdain for women for disdain towards the peccadilloes of actors. The ending, however, stays the same.

by Walter Chaw Oliver and Barbara Rose (Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner) have it all: a beautiful house, two children, a dog, a cat, and a burning hatred for one another nursed through years of disintegrating familiarity. The first irony of The War of the Roses is that a film structured around a divorce is named after a historical conflict that ended in marriage--an indication that in addition to being brutally funny, the film is whip smart and dangerous. Framed by sleazy divorce lawyer Gavin D'Amato (Danny DeVito) as a cautionary tale to a prospective client (Dan Castellaneta), The War of the Roses charts the disintegration of the Roses' marriage from sylvan bliss to Stygian night. In no uncertain terms, the film details why dog people should not marry cat people; just how irritating eating a steak can be to your spouse; and the reason that angry sex is the only sex for some couples. A brilliant screenplay (Michael Leeson adapted Warren Adler's novel) and a trio of performances that honour the sharpness and difficulty of said script justifies watching this alternately just-bearable and agonizing comedy.

by Walter ChawCrash by way of Cormac McCarthy, Tommy Lee Jones's "fuck you" of a mouthful The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is another fairytale salvo from the race divide, fired from that good place that results in cultural artifacts so unbearably cheesy and proselytizing that any potential heat is lost long before the second reel has finished unspooling. It's about serendipity, this elegy for the American West, hence no transgression is left unredeemed in its long, rambling, "it's good for you, so swallow it" narrative, with blame going in equal portion to Jones--whose smug, smarter-than-you are attitude has shoehorned him into prestigious position as the resident asshole of Man of the House, Men in Black II, and The Missing--and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (21 Grams, Amores Perros), who paints every Mexican in the film in the same shade of saintly. (All the gringos, on the other hand, have a lot to learn about the grand mystery of being human.) It's tedious, unsurprising stuff, this picture--the kind of thing that gets the Right in a bunch about how Hollywood is a tool of the subversive Lefties while making smart folks on both sides of the Culture War cringe before its condescension.

by Walter Chaw Stephen Herek's return to the realm of dope-head fantasy (his second and perhaps most remembered film is Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure) gets off to a smashing start. For a brief, exhilarating time, he captures all the dim-witted exuberance, all the pathological pride, all the explosive machismo of long-haired, tight-leathered cock-rock bands and the symbiotic relationship they have with fans, who revere them as greasy, gyrating lizard kings. Once it becomes another tired cautionary tale of sex, drugs, and rock n' roll, however, Rock Star turns off the amps and coasts home like a rusted-out DeSoto running on fumes.

by Walter Chaw Rawson Marshall Thurber's return to the territory of the screwball gross-out comedy that put him on the map, the better-than-it-should-be Dodgeball, is the better-than-it-should-be (but not as good as Dodgeball) We're The Millers, an essentially plotless road-trip intrigue that nonetheless glances off 2013's concern with the decline of the middle class while providing a couple of chuckles along the way. It's the lowbrow version of Albert Brooks's Lost in America if looked at through a particularly sympathetic lens--a hint of a conversation about class, a whiff of something about how hard it is to make a living on streets getting meaner by the day. Ultimately, it's probably just lucky that the cast assembled has an impressive improvisational pedigree (and that the director is open to making adjustments midstream), lending a stale comedy of mistaken identity a degree of perhaps-undeserved life. It probably doesn't hurt that We're the Millers never, at any point, tries to be something it's not: rescued by a total lack of ambition.

by Walter Chaw For those wondering what it would be like if one of those READER'S DIGEST "Drama in Real Life"s were ever made into a film, wonder no longer, for Touching the Void, packaged complete with suspense-shattering survivor testimonials and manageable tidbits of easily-digestible narrative, is a cunning simulacrum of the same. A feature-length dramatic re-creation in the television tabloid style, Touching the Void tells of a harrowing mountaineering cock-up that is, I guess, legendary in mountaineering circles for the same reason that dead NASCAR drivers are legendary in their sport. The problem though isn't with the ultimate banality of this account of one guy who crawls to safety down the bottom half a mountain he's already fallen down the top half of, but that the film of it mixes the victims of their own daredevil genes offering their perspective in front of a black backdrop with re-enactments featuring wheezy actors not entirely up to the task.

January 23, 2005|Niels Mueller is part of a graduating class at Tufts that includes Oliver Platt, Hank Azaria, and his collaborator on Tadpole, director Gary Winick, and he may have trumped them all in terms of size of splash with The Assassination of Richard Nixon. Financed in part by Alfonso Cuarón, Leonardo DiCaprio, and USC film-school buddy Alexander Payne and starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, Mueller's hyphenate debut was invited to show at the Cannes Film Festival and is now trickling into theatres across the nation, at the tail end of one of the most contentious election years in recent memory. Although The Assassination of Richard Nixon doesn't pack the emotional punch of Taxi Driver, the film to which it has invited the most (and not at all unfavourable) comparisons, Mueller has a good eye for composition, a good ear for dialogue (particularly in a small cameo tour de force from Michael Wincott), and a good head for the topical project. After a quick chat about the state of modern film criticism, Mr. Mueller, sounding an awful lot like Alexander Payne over the telephone, spoke at length on the subject of his first feature.

by Walter ChawThe Butterfly Effect is tidy, nifty even, a great little genre picture that wallows in ugliness, child abuse, animal abuse, classism, and misogyny but with a dirty polish that tends to distract a little from the nastiness. Evan (Ashton Kutcher) suffers from blackouts, has ever since he was a kid, and no wonder, as there seems to be some nasty bouts of molestation, baby murder, and dog immolation buried in there, desperately in need of some good old-fashioned repression. Now a psych student at State U (his research having something to do with memory, naturally), he discovers that he can "possess" himself at various stages of his youth after being triggered by the comp book journals he's been keeping ever since he started having his spells. His efforts at "fixing" the tragedies of his life all tend towards failure, however, as every little wrinkle he puts in the fabric of time results in catastrophic changes in the present. The Butterfly Effect owes a great debt, then, to Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder," Brian Aldiss's "Poor Little Warrior," William Goldman's Control, and Clive Barker's "The Inhuman Condition"; that it manages to honour to some degree each one of its sources (if only with the precision lavished on the telling of its dank tale) identifies the picture as a most difficult beast to embrace--and just as difficult to dislike. The craft above reproach, it's the content that worries.

by Walter Chaw There is a keystone moment in the middle of One Hour Photo where lonely SavMart photo-technician Sy (Robin Williams) mourns his impending layoff by providing uncanny approximations of the comedy and tragedy masks in fast succession. Long our weeping velvet-clown chronicler of the twee ironic comedy of life in balance with death (hence his affection for misusing cancer-riddled kids and turning every film, including this one, into a Jacko-esque kid-love pulpit), Williams isn't stretching here to play a lonely and disturbed old guy who becomes fixated on a pretty family so much as he's indulging yet again in an aspect of his persona always fluttering under the surface of his more frenetic characterizations.